ScalaTest 2.0 series nears with second milestone release

With Scala as a language getting several new intricacies, you need a tool capable of testing them. Look no further…

With more and more developers being allured by the charms of
Scala, a number of complementary projects have been spun out by
Typesafe and others to reflect the evergreen language such as the
Play Framework and event driver Akka.

But one project, now a comparative veteran after its first
available version appeared back in 2009, is ScalaTest. The team behind the open
source testing framework for both Java and Scala applications, are
overseeing a transformation, with the second series of the
framework set to arrive imminently. Fortunately they brought us a
sneak glimpse of the second milestone for ScalaTest 2.0.

ScalaTest, designed by a number of core developers at Artima, works
in the shadows to make teams as productive as possible through
providing simple clear concise code hints, depending on the culture
within the team.

Arguably its biggest appeal is that it doesn’t force a certain
coding philosophy or tool down your throat, and preaches that the
tool should be at the side, letting you work out what is the most
productive method. But that doesn’t mean a closed wall policy at
all – with ScalaTest possible to be integrated into tools like
JUnit, TestNG, Ant, Maven, and sbt.

From small homebrew projects to mission critical software,
ScalaTest aims to be flexible – easy to pick up and provides a
gradual learning curve to Scala master.

ScalaTest 2.0 irons out the main problem for Scala users, which is
tools support, providing enhancements to IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA
and the Scala IDE for Eclipse. There’s the ability to dynamically
tag tests, meaning new features such wildcards and rerunnable tests
and also the possibility of on-the-fly sorting of events during
parallel runs. Much of ScalaTest’s documentation has been reworked
making it even easier for newcomers to pick up tips and tricks,
especially when it comes to learning the latest Scaladoc language
features.

According to the team, this milestone is ‘very stable’ and ‘fully
tested’ – a rare case for a preliminary glimpse at a full release,
suggesting that the bulk of the work has been done. There’s still
some polishing to be done, but why not check it out, by downloading
here. A detailed
list of changes is provided. Now we just need to get our
hands on the final version.